November 20, 2018 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
Hume May Have Provoked Bayes
Last night we were considering the four
reasons given by Hume as to why any story of miracle should at the very onset
be discarded unless some strong evidences are forthcoming.
We had gone through the first two last
night.
(c) The third reason is logically not a
very sound one in which Hume claims that men who believe in miracles have a
tendency to be violent and barbaric.
(d) The last and very valid reason for not
believing in miracles that they often tend to be in conflict with each other
thereby undermining each other’s claims.
Bayes in contrast to Hume was obviously a
believer of all sorts including of gods and miracles.
So it may be that to counter the argument
put forth by Hume Bayes may have taken an in depth interest in the study of probability
though we can never be certain of it.
Nothing of what Bayes studied and
researched on probability and for what his name has become a legend for did he
publish in his life time that lasted for 59 years.
It was an English mathematician Richard
Price (who also supported the British colonies in North America in their War of
Independence) who was asked to become the literary executor of Thomas Bayes.
Price as an executor while going through
the works of Bayes discovered a paper that he edited and published in 1763, two
years after the death of its primary author.
The paper was titled, “An Essay towards
Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” and was read out to the Royal
Society in 1763.
The term “doctrine of chances” is an older
version of the modern term for “theory of probability”.
Bayes’s paper was very modest in its scope
and ambition but it would later prove to be the beginning of an entire new
branch of mathematics known as conditional probability.
Conditional probability in very simple
terms is the probability of an event A happening given that another event B has
taken place.
This term “the conditional probability of A
given B” in the language of mathematics is written as P(A/B).
Just consider for instance a very simple
example that is often encountered in medical profession when it comes to
prevalence of diseases in certain population.
Consider the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes
mellitus that is not because of insulin deficiency in the human body but due to
cells not adequately responding to insulin molecules.
It is primarily a defect or disease of
insulin receptors on the surfaces of somatic cells.
If the prevalence of Non-insulin Diabetes
Mellitus is say 9% in the adult world population, it will increase to say 60%
if the person is a Hindu of South-Asian origin, is obese and affluent and has a
sedentary life style.
The famous ‘Monty Hall Problem’, the
‘Three Prisoners Problem’ and the Bertrand’s Box Paradox are based upon this
very conditional probability.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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